Cormac Gordon: When the game gets too big

AP photoFlorida coach Urban Meyer gets doused at the end of a 51-24 win over Cincinnati in the Sugar Bowl.Friday night’s big 51-24 Sugar Bowl romp over Cincinnati was two-time national champion Urban Meyer’s last game coaching the Florida Gators.

Maybe.

Then again, maybe not.

Last week, Meyer announced he was stepping down as maybe the most successful college football coach in America.

He pointed to a stress-related health scare during which an ambulance rushed the well-to-do and super-successful 45-year-old to a hospital. The alarming incident occurred in the middle of the night following Florida’s lone loss of the season.

Later, Meyer spoke of obsessive behavior that had him texting recruits while sitting in church on Sundays. He painted the picture of someone so consumed by his work that he was worried about his family, and his own health.

He was out, he declared.

Then the newly retired coach took a turn, and announced that he was just stepping away from his job for a while.

He’d changed his mind, and would return to Gator Nation soon enough. Perhaps in August, was the new story, just in time for summer two-a-days.

Maybe.

But nothing was actually finalized. Even now, the Meyer situation is still very much up in the air.

"We’ll address the future at the appropriate time," he cautioned his fans in the wee hours of yesterday morning, following the Sugar Bowl win.

The hand-wringing back-and-forth leads us to a simple question on this long New Year’s weekend that is stuffed end-to-end with college bowl games. When does the behavior of a college coach begin to send the exact wrong message to the players he is supposed to be teaching?

I’m not questioning Meyer’s motives, mind you. Or even the methods he uses in coaching, which is a profession necessarily filled with emotion.

This isn’t a story like the one of the obviously over-the-top Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach, who lost a pretty sweet gig last week for shuffling an injured player off to some "solitary time" in a work shed.

Leach and his supporters can come up with a million stories about how lazy and irresponsible Adam James was as a Tech player, and they can make any type of case they want about what a busy-body parent the former NFL star and current ESPN analyst Craig James has been since his son came to play for Leach.

And everything they say might even be true.

But you still can’t order a college player into a darkened shed because you don’t think he’s giving the team his all.

Leach could have benched James

He could have suspended him.

The coach could have even begun a conversation with father and son about how a change of scenery to a different college campus might best.

But the coach can’t abuse the player.

That’s the bottom line. And all the excuses after the fact aren’t going to change that. Meyer is a different story, but with the same lack of proportion.

The same question of perspective.

Of balance.

And of what’s right for the players.

If losing a game is such a trauma that it sends the coach to the hospital in fear of having suffered a heart attack, what message does that send to players who are presumably heading into a real life someday where you win and lose every day?

Should they all line up at the university infirmary after a loss for stress checks?

And if serial texting of recruits becomes such a habit that you can’t stop, even at church, what does that say about letting obsession get the best of you?

And what ever happened to the idea of learning to play as hard as you possibly can, then walking away from the result once it’s over?

If Urban Meyer grew too entangled in his job, well, he’s certainly not the first person to fall into that trap. It doesn’t make him a bad guy. And luckily for him, Meyer has the support and the financial ability to step away and take a breather.

Stepping down seems like the right thing for everyone, including himself.

But when he decides in the blink of an eye that he can’t do what he said he was going to do in the first place, he is sending his players the wrong message once again.

Not to mention once more letting the game be bigger than it should be.